GAME BYTES: Games are full of stagnant ideas

Thursday

Jun 5, 2014 at 10:00 AMJun 5, 2014 at 10:14 AM

It’s 2014, and we’ve made all the different types of video games we’re going to ever have.That’s ridiculous and untrue, but that’s what it feels like most of the time. New games must come through the filter of previous ones, meaning their pitches usually go like this: “OK, I want to make a game about altering people’s memories, so let’s strap that on a game where you fight lots of people,” or “This game is about hacking the world, so let’s program that mechanic on top of a GTA template.”

By Phil OwenSpecial to Tusk

It’s 2014, and we’ve made all the different types of video games we’re going to ever have.That’s ridiculous and untrue, but that’s what it feels like most of the time. New games must come through the filter of previous ones, meaning their pitches usually go like this: “OK, I want to make a game about altering people’s memories, so let’s strap that on a game where you fight lots of people,” or “This game is about hacking the world, so let’s program that mechanic on top of a GTA template.”In the real world, most folks are good at one thing. They have that thing and maybe some other skills they are less good at, but certainly they aren’t good at everything. This is why games like “Remember Me” and “Watch Dogs,” the two titles I alluded to above, are so frustrating. They feature playable characters with a unique defining skill that they are better at than anyone else, and then other generic skills they are also better at than everyone else. In “Remember Me,” you can change people’s memories, something no one else can do, but also you can climb around and beat up, with your fists, every head-to-toe armored guard in town. In “Watch Dogs,” you can hack everything with your phone, but you’re also the best driver and a brilliant combat specialist. It’s ridiculous.This is an outcropping of an old trope that came from a limitation of technology: the “one person takes on an army” trend of games of yesteryear that ran on underpowered computers and consoles. We still have games that are like that, aside from Batman stories, and there’s little good reason as for why that is.The main one, though, is that filter I mentioned before. For whatever reason, games now are being filtered through games from 20 years ago even though the tech running these things has advanced 100-fold in that time. So we have games that are like the old ones but prettier, and maybe with a twist, but the heart of everything is still also the heart of something old.And that is very strange to me. Well, it’s strange as a consumer of a broad swath of media. For the gamer side of me, I unfortunately get it. Gaming, sadly, is built on the concept of “What has been made previously that we can use to get you to buy something new?” There’s a specific avoidance of making products that are actually thorough in their newness. Every decade or so we get something like the Wii that seeks a new audience, but when something new is built on hardware rather than software, it can’t last, because to do so, it would have to remove what is already there. The people who use gamepads are the ones who will continue to spend money on games, and so it’s with a gamepad that developers of new things must begin. But they aren’t doing it, and it’s becoming embarrassing. There are so many niches to be filled, and nobody is trying to fill them. Conventional wisdom says filling unserved niches is a business model in itself, but only in gaming is that model not even attempted. And so gaming has stagnated, both in audience size and creativity. Someday that will be our death. n